Archives for November 2006

In the latest issue of Interchanges, a newsletter produced by the Centre for Creative Communities, the strapline reads Community? What Community? It notes the media’s obsession with the ongoing “fragmentation of society” and New Labour’s worries over “community cohesion”, that also features strongly in the local government white paper. It then descends into babble about building “processes of community engagement” and the “importance of wide consensus and empowerment”.

Likewise the white paper makes the promotion of community and neighbourhood engagement its overriding theme. Indeed it imposes a new duty on local authorities to “ensure community participation” and to this end “actively involve the third sector wherever it can”. There is a proposal for “encouraging the take-up of neighbourhood management schemes” including tenant management organisations, for instance. This consensus is reflected in the [Housing Associations as] Community Anchors study. We are proudly told that some housing associations already “promote community empowerment and active citizenship and support community projects”.

I don’t want you to think me overly dismissive. But the question I always ask when so-called active citizenship and empowerment are put forward as answers to whatever policy question is being asked, is: “To what end?” How are your clients – be they tenants, patients or schoolchildren – participating? The emphasis is on making the processes more amenable to involving people in the decision-making process. But decisions about what? And why? My experience as a local government consultation officer was that nobody had the faintest idea why we should be consulting, only that we should. This kind of mindless consensus has troubled me ever since.

But what troubles me even more is the inflated “Power to the People” rhetoric emanating from government. Of course, they are proposing nothing of the sort. It is a cynical exercise in off-loading responsibility in the hope of gaining political as well as social capital. The real power, the political power to set the agenda and define terms, remains firmly in Whitehall, and is only intensified as the phoney power to administer state-approved programmes is devolved.

This is the context in which the proposed “transfer of assets to the community” in the white paper – be they village halls, community centres or the local SureStart – must be seen. This ends up conflating community groups with communities themselves. On what grounds do they speak for communities? For the vulnerable and under-represented?

The notion that this is a new form of public ownership is also mistaken because the public is further fragmented into interest groups, be they parents, residents or groups organised around particular faiths, each scrambling for a piece of the action. This is the original problem, the splintering of our society, bizarrely dressed up as the solution.

Distant government

The Cabinet Office flatters “the increasingly important role the third sector plays in both society and the economy” by giving it its own office in government. This is echoed in the white paper, not least as the basis upon which an elaborate process of public asset-stripping in the name of civil renewal might proceed. But this just confirms, for me, how distant the government is from communities. Its reluctance to engage directly with society, preferring instead to co-opt apparently willing intermediaries, is testament to this.

For all the hot air about community, there is a real problem. A recent study, commissioned by the Norwich Union, found that one in 10 of us go a month without speaking to our neighbours. And the government’s solutions bear a striking resemblance to those offered up by Norwich Union. The latter’s report says that they are in favour of a more neighbourly society because, for instance, it saves you installing a CCTV camera by becoming protective neighbours.

The notion that the raison d’etre of communities is crime avoidance, detering antisocial behaviour and healthy living is depressing. This is not about the “effective management” of your housing stock, as the Community Anchors study would have it, but the micro-management of your tenants’ lives. When I hear that a housing association in Blackpool is involved in an initiative to reduce teenage pregnancy, I despair. What business is it of yours to tell teenage girls they mustn’t have kids? The vast majority of them are adults anyway. It just goes to show that the choice agenda is a misnomer – the only choice admissible is the right one.

The Community Anchors study talks about creating “neighbourhoods where people want to live”‘. There is a slippage from the onus being on housing authorities and associations to provide people with decent homes to the onus being on the community, in partnership with those organisations, to police its behaviour.

Last week Hazel Blears gave a talk in Birmingham entitled, Rebuidling our Communities, Revitalising our Politics. The pretence that the community agenda is anything but self-serving is barely-concealed. Her search for “shared values, common interests, [and] understood rules of behaviour” only reflects what is lacking in contemporary political culture. The “chaos” that apparently reins in some of our communities, according to Blears, is as much a reflection of the absence of conviction, vision and a sense of purpose in Westminster, as on the “mean streets” of Salford.

Community spirit

Her speech is also a reminder of what community means for New Labour. It is not something that just exists. Blears, for example, tells us that “government creates the framework for communities to come out from behind the locked doors of fear and trepidation and to step out into the street”. But this notion of communities under siege from hooded hoodlums, or in need of self- appointed facilitators, exaggerates people’s vulnerability and underestimates their capacity to deal with it on their own.

Strong communities in the past were born out of and thrived upon their common experience of adversity, and were defined more often than not in their hostility to the powers that be, not a willingness to work in partnership with them. Rediscovering the Blitz spirit might sound attractive but you’d have to re-enact the Blitz for it to re-emerge. The community spirit that Blears yearns for cannot be re-created by the government’s new volunteering programme for young people; or by blaming teachers for not teaching kids how to be “tomorrow’s active citizens”.

The notion that the problem of community might be solved if the state and its intermediaries intervene in the minutae of people’s lives, only confirms that we don’t know what the problem is – and trivialises any attempts to find out. It also allows interested parties to exploit the new agenda to solve their own existential crisis. Admittedly, for housing associations, this has been brought to a head by a squeeze on resources as public money for new homes is projected to fall yet further.

But still I urge you not to go down this route. The likely outcome is unwarranted intervention in the lives of tenants and an undermining of your relationship with those tenants and communities as a result. The danger is that in becoming the landlord from hell you will undermine any informal notions of neighbourliness that might otherwise flourish.

I’d be delighted to hear about tenants demanding more and better housing and getting it, rather than simply learning that they’ve turfed out another antisocial neighbour. And the more that housing associations take on this “wider role” as it is mysteriously referred to in the Community Anchors study, the more they end up policing communities themselves.

Stick to what you know. You should be content with remaining “builders in communities” not least because that is what society needs. By becoming “community builders” you will in reality be doing a demolition job on the very foundations of community.

Watch Me Disappear at times reads like a darker literary take on the ‘I love…’ TV format, peppered as it is with the 1970s trivia of spangles, twister and such like. The juxtaposition with child abuse, child abduction, dodgy adults and a simmering family crisis, is particularly striking. It is also a ‘coming of age’ piece about growing up, about the slightly disturbing games young girls play (or used to play), and their awkward encounters with older boys. In the current climate of pervasive fear and anxiety that surrounds discussion about children, their safety, and ‘well-being’, we perhaps have more difficulty separating the two (child abuse and the normal experiences of growing up) thus adding to the ambiguity and the reader’s uneasiness.

The stark descriptions of the landscape of Ely, Cambridgeshire where the novel is set, an island until the Fens were drained in the 1600s, are particularly evocative, portraying an overwhelming sense of brooding discontent, hidden secrets and impending revelation. Ely cathedral, we are told, is ‘the only solid thing in a landscape made of mist and water, smoke and mirrors’. Tina’s dad likens it to a ship, but now it is ‘tipping’, sinking like everything else, he says. Her mum used to describe her dad’s tempers as a ‘Fen Blow’. Mum hates the landscape for its exposed flatness, for what it might reveal. When the real Fen blows out of season she thinks it a ‘freak of nature’, a ‘terrible sign’ that things are ‘not right’. The unnatural goings on are portended in the surroundings.

The novel is dripping in metaphors, not least about water, its power, its pressure. On hearing a particularly shocking revelation, Tina tells us: ‘My ears explode. A whoosh as the pressure inside my head bursts like a balloon’. You can’t help but anticipate a watery end for her ‘missing’ friend, Mandy. You find yourself waiting for the surface of the Fens to be breached by the water beneath, for nature to reassert itself, bursting that ‘fine black skin capping the centuries of water, the secrets’. But this releasing and revealing is not all for the good. ‘Now it’s unspooling right in front of me and it’s too late to rewind’ she says. It’s being dredged up with the water but the evidence, like the cathedral, is slowly sinking from view.

Tina has a kind of epilepsy causing flashbacks and hallucinations. She consequently has quite an imagination. Though this leads us to doubt her accounts and revisitings, the reader is nevertheless encouraged to share her suspicions about her dad. He is we learn ‘a bit funny’ and has a ‘thing about girls’, euphemisms that once served their purpose well, I think. People knew each other more or less, particularly in communities like Ely, and consequently knew who and what they were talking about. They had shared points of reference against which to judge deviations. Though this could of course bring on Salem tendencies, so too does our own more individuated and anonymous culture of suspicion and vetting.

But there seems to be a turning point. The Moors murders (and to a lesser extent, the early prowlings of the Yorkshire Ripper) were a watershed in the public consciousness. In one of her flashbacks to the 1970s of her youth, Tina and her mum are watching a news report. ‘There are some terrible, wicked people in the world, Tina’, her mum tells her. The more measured tones of her Partridge Family equivalent – ‘Bad things happen but there are still plenty of good people in the world’ – seems a little less real. It just doesn’t cut it anymore. The slightest reference is made to the infamous tapes the Moors murderers made of one of their victims, but that’s all it takes for this reviewer. I couldn’t help thinking that everything changed just then. Those recordings were testament to the most awful inhumanities imaginable inflicted upon children. Or so we were told. Most of us (all of us?) have never heard them. They are ‘unimaginable’, but that’s what makes them so disturbing, because we try to imagine them despite ourselves. In that way, we are all a little like Tina perhaps.

Back to the present and the objects of our fear and loathing are less obvious. When her sister-in-law comments that ‘half of England’ is searching for the missing girls, Tina playfully, misanthropically, wonders if the other half might be ‘the abductors and paedophiles’. Thinking back, she and all her friends had their ‘dodgy encounter growing up’. The dirty old man. The flasher. It was accepted, a ‘giggle with your mates’. Only now does she wonder how these ‘encounters’ might have featured in the papers the next day if things had turned out different.

This is a theme that really chimed with this reviewer. The all-pervading uncertainty, of Tina’s failing to put her finger on the source of her anxieties about the past, about what remains just out of view. It is the ‘ill-defined, inchoate sense of something, something not right’ in her childhood. It is not a particular event but something ‘more nebulous, cumulative. It’s not specifics but feelings’, she says. This is a familiar feature of the endless child abuse panics that parents (and the rest of us) are subjected to. We are told abuse is everywhere, and yet actual known instances turn out to be rare. It is the mismatch, the space between the two that heightens our fears. Related to this are the variations on the theme of absence. Such as being lost, failing to find something or grasping for what is just out of reach. This idea of being ‘at sea’ (to use another watery metaphor) or losing your bearings in the featureless Fens is also, it seems to me, a property of a culture that has come to lose its way and, importantly in this discussion, its sense of perspective. Watch Me Disappear, for all its preoccupation with the past, is a book of its times.

Dave Clements Limited

I am a writer and consultant with over fifteen years experience working in senior strategic, management, project and engagement roles, and advising local government, the NHS and other public sector and VCS organisations. I am available for commissions.